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Vasyl Stus was born on January 6, 1938 into a peasant family in the village of Rakhnivka, Haisyn Raion, Vinnytsia Oblast (province), Ukrainian SSR. Next year, his parents Semen Demyanovych and Iryna Yakivna moved to the city of Stalino (now Donetsk). Their children joined them one year later. Vasyl first encountered the Ukrainian language and poetry from his mother who sang him Ukrainian folk songs.

After the secondary school, Vasyl Stus entered the Department of history and literature of the Pedagogical Institute in Stalino (nowadays Donetsk University). In 1959 he graduated from the institute with honours. Following graduation, Stus briefly worked as a high school teacher of Ukrainian language and literaturein Tauzhnia village of Kirovohrad Oblast, and then was conscripted to the Soviet Army for two years. During the study and military service in the Ural mountains he started to write poetry and translated into Ukrainian more than a hundred verses by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Rainer Maria Rilke. The original copies of his translations were later confiscated by KGB and they were lost.

After the military service, Vasyl Stus worked as an editor in the newspaper Sotsialistychnyi Donbas (Socialist Donbas) in 1960-1963. In 1963, he entered a Doctoral (PhD) program at the Shevchenko Institute of Literature of Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in Kiev. At the same time he published his selected poetry.

In 1965 Stus has got married; his son, Dmytro was born in 1966.

On September 4, 1965 during the premiere of the Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors movie in Kiev's Ukrayina cinema, Vasyl Stus took part in a protest against arrests of Ukrainian intelligentsia. For the protest participation, on September 20 he was expelled from the Institute and later lost his job at the State Historical Archive. He then worked in a few places as a building constructor, a fireman, and an engineer, continuing his intensive work on poetry. In 1965 he submitted his first book Circulation (??????????) for publishing, but it was rejected due to discrepancy with Soviet ideology and artistic style. His next poetry book Winter Trees (?????? ??????) was also rejected, regardless of positive reviews from a poet ?van Drach and a critic Eugen Adelgejt. The book was published in 1970 in Belgium.

On September 7, 1972, Stus was arrested for "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda". He served a 5 year sentence in a labor camp, and two more in exile in the Magadan Oblast.

In August 1979, having finished his sentence, he returned to Kiev and worked in a foundry. He spoke out in defense of members of the Ukrainian Helsinki group (UHG). Stus himself joined the UHG in October 1979.

“In Kiev I learned that people close to the Helsinki Group were being repressed in the most flagrant manner. This at least had been the case in the trials of Ovsiyenko, Horbal, Lytvyn, and they were soon to deal similarly with Chornovil and Rozumny. I didn’t want that kind of Kiev. Seeing that the Group had been left rudderless, I joined it because I couldn’t do otherwise When life is taken away, I had no need of pitiful crumbs. Psychologically I understood that the prison gates had already opened for me and that any day now they would close behind me — and close for a long time. But what was I supposed to do? Ukrainians were not able to leave the country, and anyway I didn’t particularly want to go beyond those borders since who then, here, in Great Ukraine, would become the voice of indignation and protest? This was my fate, and you don’t choose your fate. You accept it, whatever that fate may be. And when you don’t accept it, it takes you by force However I had no intention of bowing my head down, whatever happened. Behind me was Ukraine, my oppressed people, whose honour I had to defend or perish”. (“Z tabornoho zoshyta” [“From the camp notebook”], 1983).

On 14 May, 1980, prior to the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow, he was arrested and received a 10 year sentence for "anti-Soviet activity".

Vasyl Stus died after he declared hunger strike on September 4, 1985 in a Soviet forced labor camp for political prisoners Perm-36 near the village of Kuchino, Perm Oblast, Russian SFSR, where he had been transferred in November 1980. Danylo Shumuk reported that the commandant, a certain Maj. Zhuravkov, committed suicide after the death of Vasyl Stus. It must be noted that in the Kuchino camp, out of 56 inmates kept there between 1980 and 1987, 8 died, including 4 members of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group.

In 1985, an international committee of scholars, writers, and poets nominated Stus as a candidate for the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature, but he died before the nomination materialized. He was nominated by a German writer Heinrich Böll, who publicly stated that he expected Stus to win the prestigious prize.

On 19 November 1989 the remains of Vasyl Stus, Oleksa Tykhy and Yury Lytvyn were brought back to Kyiv and reburied at the Baikove Cemetery. More than thirty thousand people attended the ceremony.

January 1989 the first non-governmental Vasyl Stus Prizes were awarded for “talent and courage”. This Prize was set up by the Ukrainian Association of the Independent Creative Intelligentsia, and is awarded every year on the poet’s date of birth in Lviv.

In 1993 Stus was posthumously awarded the Taras Shevchenko State Prize for Literature.

On January 8, 2008 the National bank of Ukraine issued a commemorative coin dedicated to Vasyl Stus and on January 25, 2008 Ukrposhta issued a stamp in his memory.

In December 2008 a group of current and former students of the Donetsk National University published send an appeal to the Minister of Education asking that the university be named after (one of its graduates,) Vasyl Stus. The Minister supported the initiative and approached the Rector of the university with a request to discuss the issue among staff and at the academic council. On February 17, 2009 62 out of 63 members of the university's academic council voted against renaming the university to Vasyl Stus or Volodomyr Degtyaryov (61 voted against this), 63 voted for not chancing the name of the institute. Earlier (February 13, 2009) representatives of the university's students voted in exact the same fashion.